Evidence of meeting #26 for Finance in the 41st Parliament, 2nd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was youth.
A recording is available from Parliament.
NDP
Matthew Dubé NDP Chambly—Borduas, QC
Since I have only one minute left, I will ask my final question. This is a short question for the FEUQ.
In your response to the budget, you talk a lot about the return of students to their regions. In the current study, there has been a lot of discussion about mobility, employment mobility in particular.
Would you like to briefly comment on that?
President, Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec
Actually, it is a form of land occupancy. Young people are encouraged to go back to their home regions or to go live in rural areas once they complete their studies in the cities.
Our regions are being abandoned by young people. They go to big cities to find jobs. By encouraging young people to return to those regions, by providing incentives such as a tax credit, we encourage them to settle in those towns instead of abandoning them.
NDP
NDP
Matthew Dubé NDP Chambly—Borduas, QC
To wrap up, perhaps Mr. Farrington would also like to make a quick comment on the mobility of young people and their return to their regions.
Conservative
Internal Coordinator, Canadian Federation of Students
Absolutely.
Rural education is a major factor. We have a system that has encouraged certain industries to be focused in specific areas. We do have a serious problem in the country in terms of regional disparity and diversity of the employment opportunities. That's something that needs to be addressed, absolutely.
Conservative
Conservative
Andrew Saxton Conservative North Vancouver, BC
Thank you, Chair.
Thanks to our witnesses for being here today.
First, to Dr. Schmidt, can you tell us what more we can be doing as a government to encourage young Canadians to pursue careers in the STEM fields?
Founder and President, Let's Talk Science
Quite a lot of international research has focused on the barriers. Depending on the age of the young people, the barriers are slightly different. At the high school level, it's a lack of role models; the lack of perceived relevance is actually quite large. Often the amount that's being taught is a mile wide and a mile deep, and the contextual basis is sometimes missing.
Another piece is a lack of career awareness. I have a 15-year-old daughter, and when she comes back after her math and physics class, she says, “Here's what I did today. I have no clue why I'm going to do this, or what job will ever ask me to do this again. I know I need to take science, because you're my mother, but....”
Founder and President, Let's Talk Science
A lot of the work we're doing is with the universities, colleges, industry, and the provinces to build that context.
I do want to point out that most teachers in the country haven't had employability opportunities outside the classroom, yet even 50 years ago the conversation we would be having would be about how to keep our young people in school. Half our graduates weren't even finishing high school in an agrarian society, and didn't have the skills. Now all of a sudden we're saying that the provinces should be doing it, the teachers should be doing it, yet the place of work looks enormously different than it did even 50 years ago.
Conservative
Andrew Saxton Conservative North Vancouver, BC
So it's better career counselling, it sounds like: mentoring, role models, and things like that.
Founder and President, Let's Talk Science
Role models, mentoring, contextualization—I'm not entirely sure I'd go as far as categorizing it as just career mentoring, but that's definitely a component of it.
The other piece to keep in mind with the whole STEM field is that it's not just trying to prepare people for knowledge-based jobs or the traditional jobs that we often equate with being an engineer or a science teacher. The skills that are developed are the kinds of 21st century skills that we keep talking about as being critically important to employers. The opportunity to do experiential science learning, especially at the elementary, high school, and post-secondary levels, builds many of those kinds of skills.
Conservative
Andrew Saxton Conservative North Vancouver, BC
Thank you very much.
My next question is for Mr. Farrington.
Brent, you mentioned a few things. First of all, you very eloquently described the difficulty that young Canadians have in getting jobs or appropriate jobs. What does your organization specifically do to help young Canadians get jobs?
Internal Coordinator, Canadian Federation of Students
The Canadian Federation of Students—I didn't put it in the part at the beginning—we are Canada's largest student organization. We represent over 600,000 students across the country.
In terms of the work that we do, a big part of what we do on the advocacy side is to try to bring forward the issues and concerns from our membership. Most of the directives in terms of what you're asking specifically about come from our members. Twice a year our members meet and determine where the prioritization should be for our advocacy work, and in terms of career counselling and things like that, we actually work closely with a variety of partners, including the ACCC, the AUCC, to determine where those types of funding, financing opportunities, research excellence grants, things like that, should be going.
Conservative
Andrew Saxton Conservative North Vancouver, BC
You mentioned the issue of unpaid internships, and this is a big issue to you and your organization. You even went so far as to say that we should eliminate unpaid internships. Now my question to you is, if we were to eliminate unpaid internships and those unpaid internships were not replaced with paid internships, then we've just lost a whole opportunity for young Canadians to get experience. So what do you say about that?
Internal Coordinator, Canadian Federation of Students
The recommendation I made was that the federal government, as a first step, essentially try to pave the way for other industries to eliminate this outdated practice that has been abused throughout society.
I think that the idea of getting skills through internships is certainly one that's very much alive, but it's being abused by industries. We have hospitality groups right now that are doing training mechanisms where unpaid internship positions are used to have people wash dishes. I don't think that is the type of skill that any individual student is hoping to attain when they take the risk of finding an unpaid internship. But frankly the labour market is set up in such a way right now that there aren't those opportunities that exist to essentially allow them to continue their skills, so they find themselves forced to gain experience through these precarious work environments, or in the worst-case scenario, through unpaid internship positions that actually provide them with no additional training for their field.
Conservative
Andrew Saxton Conservative North Vancouver, BC
I agree that they're not the ideal situation, but to say somebody is forced to do something voluntarily is an oxymoron.
But here's the next question for you.
Conservative
Andrew Saxton Conservative North Vancouver, BC
Employer training you said is very low, and that's something that we recognize as well, so we brought in the Canada job grant. So you must be fairly happy with the Canada job grant, because that brings the employer into the education and training equation.
Internal Coordinator, Canadian Federation of Students
Yes, I think on the surface the Canada job grant presents a helpful alternative for employers. The details are where we will run into any problems or issues with it. We're still vetting through what those details will be. We didn't necessarily see them on budget day, as an example.
We are happy to see that the provinces have made many inroads in negotiating with the federal government on the job grant, primarily that it's not going to replace, hook, line, and sinker, the funding that was required to provide for unemployment insurance opportunities, retraining programs. So I think that there are some benefits to it. I'm not necessarily sure that it's the perfect program or an answer to this problem.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Rajotte
I'll just remind colleagues, we do need to leave enough time for the witnesses to answer.
We'll go now to Mr. Brison.
Liberal
Scott Brison Liberal Kings—Hants, NS
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to each of you for sharing with us your testimony and wisdom today.
The reason we're doing this study is we recognize that this is the labour market for young Canadians. The job market has changed fundamentally.
I was having this discussion with Mr. Keddy. We were comparing notes about when we were students and the ability to get even summer jobs, and all of this sort of thing, and he's quite a bit older than me.
The reality is that there has been a real shift and in this downturn we've lost 265,000 jobs for young Canadians—the one cohort of Canadians that hasn't recovered—and that's driving, for instance, some of the pressures behind the unpaid internship trend, where even in law firms, increasingly, articling students are not being paid, which is a shift from the past.
Would you agree that Stats Canada ought to track unpaid internships such that we can actually understand the scale of the problem, because it's hard to manage what we don't measure?